Dining Out: An Early Birthday Dinner at NextDoor Restaurant

My mom took me out for an early birthday dinner at NextDoor, and I gotta say, it's become our go-to special occasion restaurant for a reason. We've never had a dish here that was short of incredible. Our choices this evening:

Pork Sisig Bombs: Garlic rice, crispy pork filling, salmon caviar, and fried garlic in marinated bean curd pockets

Chopped Salad: Grilled chicken satay, lettuce, purple cabbage, arrots, red onions, fried shallots, crushed cashews, and fried wonton chips with soy peanut dressing

To start, the pork sisig bombs and the chopped salad. The pork sisig bombs were truly excellent — I've never had sisig before, and I don't know who's genius idea it was to stuff it inside delightfully marinated bean curd pockets, but these are INSPIRED. (I really need to try more Filipino food.) The chopped salad, which is definitely hefty enough to be a main course, was perfectly balanced in flavours and has so many amazing crunchy textures from the cabbage, cashews, and fried wonton chips that make it incredibly addictive. 

Singaporean Chili Crab: Tempura soft shell crab, P.E.I. mussels, tiger shrimp, pickled chilis, and crushed cashews with fried baos

Steak Diane: 8 oz. USDA prime top sirloin, roasted fingerling potatoes, and roasted portobello mushrooms topped with miso mushroom sauce and beer-battered onion rings

For our mains, we got the Singaporean chili crab and the Steak Diane. The chili crab — which comes with a plethora of delicious seafood — is flavour-packed and has just the right amount of savoury spice. It's the kind of spicy that makes your mouth tingle but doesn't take away from any of the other flavours. (Though, fair warning, this one might be too much if you can't handle spice in general.) I think my only critique would have been to replace the fried baos with rice  — the buns were great, but I think rice would've soaked up the sauce really nicely. Now, maybe it's because I'm just a huge fan of steak with mushrooms, but I thought the Steak Diane was utter perfection. The miso mushroom sauce was impeccable and not a drop could be wasted so we soaked up every last bit of it with the potatoes and onion rings. 

Piña Colada Tres Leches: Triple layer vanilla sponge cake, whipped cream, and cinnamon crumble served with cinnamon and rum infused pineapple and coconut ice cream

Finally, I picked the piña colada tres leches for dessert, which sounded the most unique (the other choices were strawberry shortcake, Mexican chocolate cake, and mango gelato). What I loved was that the combination of flavours — vanilla, cinnamon, pineapple, and coconut — was simultaneously tropical and comforting at the same time. And the texture of the cake was light and airy so it didn't feel heavy after such a huge meal (we did have to take half of the chili crab home — we can eat a lot but even this was too much for us). A lovely ending to an epic feast. 

I gotta say, birthday week is off to a great start!

NextDoor Restaurant

Unionville Planing Mill

139 Main St. Unionville

Markham, ON L3R 2G6

(905) 604-6983